Ultrasonic Detection of Aliased Signal Separation Based on Adaptive Feature Dictionary and K–SVD Algorithm for Protective Coatings of Assembled Steel Structure

When using ultrasound to detect the thickness of protective coatings on assembled steel structures, the coatings are extremely thin, which can cause echo signals to overlap and impair the detection accuracy. Therefore, the study of the separation of the superimposed signals is essential for the precise measurement of the thickness of thinner coatings. A method for signal time domain feature extraction based on an adaptive feature dictionary and K–SVD is investigated. First, the wavelet transform, which is sensitive to singular signal values, is used to identify the extreme values of the signal and use them as the new signal to be processed. Then, the feature signal extracted by wavelet transform is transformed into Hankel matrix form, and the initial feature dictionary is constructed by period segmentation and random extraction. The optimized feature dictionary is subsequently obtained by enhancing the K–SVD algorithm. Finally, the time domain signal is reconstructed using the optimized feature dictionary. Simulations and experiments demonstrate that the method is more accurate in separating mixed signals and extracting signal time domain feature information than the conventional wavelet transform and Gabor dictionary-based MP algorithm, and that it is more advantageous in detecting the thickness of protective coatings.